Author
Topic: The problems about plastics (Read 57 times)

Plastics are everywhere in our life. For more than 50 years the global production and consumption of plastics have continued to rise. Today we produce about 300 millions of tons every year. The growing production replaces materials like glass, metal and wood. About 4 percent of the oil production worldwide is used to make plastic each year, and another 4 percent is used to power plastic manufacturing processes with energy.Plastics are derived from materials found in nature, such as natural gas, oil, coal, minerals and plants. Because of their intermolecular bonds plastics degrade very slowly in the nature. They are also mixed with additives to improve their performance like hazardous chemicals benzene and vinyl chloride or additives like carbon or silica. Our current usage of plastic is simply not sustainable. The biggest amount of plastic, more than one third, is used for non-durable plastic items like shopping or trash bags, plastic bottles and other utensils. We are throwing them away after a short time of usage. If plastic gets recycled we still need new plastic as supplement to produce the same product because when plastic is being reprocessed, it changes to a lower quality. This means even if no more plastic was needed only the same amount, nonrenewable resources would still have to be used to produce the same product. Recycling of plastic does not mean sustainable recycling.If they are discarded improperly they are ending in the nature, sometimes for thousands of years. According a scientific working group at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis 8 million tons of plastics are ending alone in the ocean per year. They can be eaten by fishes and sea animals. These often die from the physical and chemical impact of these chemicals. Animals who survive can be a part of our food chain and the plastics in their organism can have harmful effect on the human body.